"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

March 20, 2017

Sean Spicer, Unlimited

Today, TrumpSpeak may have hit a new and stratospheric high, possibly settled on another planet, or, finally elbowed itself into some faraway alternate universe. While Trump's partisan defenders were rolling out their customary look-over-there, look-anywhere-but-here hilarities at the Comey-Rogers hearing, it was at the White House where Press Secretary Sean Spicer's intoxicated comedy really shined.

His was TrumpSpeak at its finest, its weirdest, its most absolute perfection yet.

WIth the FBI's public confirmation that it is indeed investigating connections between Putin's anti-American, Western-democracy-corrupting machinery and Trump's various apparatchiks — e.g., Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Felix Sater, J.D. Gordon, assorted Trump family members, and Paul Manafort — Spicer declared that the latter played but a "limited role" in Trump's presidential campaign.

A limited role. In reality, as you and the entire country know (but don't tell Sean), Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign throughout the summer of 2016 — the Machiavellian adult hauled into the Donald's organizational mess as a replacement for the man-child Corey Lewandowski; a manipulator of the Republican Party's platform, reworked to go easy on Russia and its recent, neighborhood brutalities.

Insisting that Manafort played but a limited role in the Trump campaign is equivalent to arguing that Bob Haldeman was an innocent, part-time Nixonian lamb — and not even Nixon, in the end, could work up the reality-torturing balls to argue that. I guess what he needed was a Sean Spicer, master of TrumpSpeak and ceremonial gibberish — who, in a way, is kind of awesome.

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Sean Spicer, Unlimited

Today, TrumpSpeak may have hit a new and stratospheric high, possibly settled on another planet, or, finally elbowed itself into some faraway alternate universe. While Trump's partisan defenders were rolling out their customary look-over-there, look-anywhere-but-here hilarities at the Comey-Rogers hearing, it was at the White House where Press Secretary Sean Spicer's intoxicated comedy really shined.

His was TrumpSpeak at its finest, its weirdest, its most absolute perfection yet.

WIth the FBI's public confirmation that it is indeed investigating connections between Putin's anti-American, Western-democracy-corrupting machinery and Trump's various apparatchiks — e.g., Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Felix Sater, J.D. Gordon, assorted Trump family members, and Paul Manafort — Spicer declared that the latter played but a "limited role" in Trump's presidential campaign.

A limited role. In reality, as you and the entire country know (but don't tell Sean), Manafort was chairman of the Trump campaign throughout the summer of 2016 — the Machiavellian adult hauled into the Donald's organizational mess as a replacement for the man-child Corey Lewandowski; a manipulator of the Republican Party's platform, reworked to go easy on Russia and its recent, neighborhood brutalities.

Insisting that Manafort played but a limited role in the Trump campaign is equivalent to arguing that Bob Haldeman was an innocent, part-time Nixonian lamb — and not even Nixon, in the end, could work up the reality-torturing balls to argue that. I guess what he needed was a Sean Spicer, master of TrumpSpeak and ceremonial gibberish — who, in a way, is kind of awesome.